Why? Customers and prospects typically don’t look for us on Facebook because we sell to businesses (B2B), not consumers. However, a company or individual could create brand confusion by presenting themselves as Knowmad on Facebook. In addition, we might later find a use for Facebook in our marketing and we don’t want to lose the opportunity to claim our brand name.

How did we decide on the use of Facebook for our brand? I’ve included a few questions in this post that helped us evaluate if Facebook is right for our business. Hopefully, these questions can help you start the conversation for your business.

Before holding this discussion, we defined our primary target audiences to make the conversation more effective.

Is our target audience on Facebook?
Yes. However, it’s not likely that our target audiences are looking to engage us on Facebook. We serve other businesses and our brand isn’t for general consumers (B2C).

Can Facebook drive traffic to our website or blog?
Maybe. It’s more likely that we can get more targeted traffic from Linkedin using our blog posts.

Would anyone buy from us on Facebook?
No. Knowmad doesn’t sell products. Our selling process is relationship-driven and not transactional.

Is Facebook a good recruiting tool for us?
Perhaps. It’s not the most efficient approach to recruiting because of our specialized need for highly skilled web strategists, web hackers and web savvy designers. We could spend quite a bit of money with little return.

If we increased our followers, what would happen?
Nothing noticeable from a business perspective.

Is there any benefit to us to use Facebook?
Yes. We don’t want someone poaching our brand name on the most widely used social network. However, this doesn’t warrant spending a lot of time on Facebook vs. other marketing opportunities.

Conclusions

These are just a few questions that could be asked about Facebook for a B2B business. The answers to these simple questions helped us quickly decide that our marketing efforts would be more effective using other avenues.

There are a lot of ways we can market our businesses, both online and offline. Given the time and budget limitations that we have, it’s important to make sure that we’re spending our time and marketing dollars wisely.

Kmart isn’t a place I shop, which isn’t saying a lot because I’m not a big in-store shopper. I can’t say I’ve even been on the Kmart website until reading this news nugget. The brand doesn’t strike me as modern, so it made me curious about how the company is using the web and what results they might achieve.

After a quick search, I found that Kmart has several initiatives on the web including a mobile app (kmart2go), mygofer.com and kmartdesign.com. Business strategy and the web are two of my favorite topics so I began to wonder…

What can we learn from Kmart?

Here’s what stands out to me about Kmart’s web strategy, none of which is surprising and gives us a great example to look at for web strategy.

• Clearly define business goals
• Segment and target specific audiences.
• Offer presentation formats specific to the target audience
• Use Social Media to augment existing marketing, PR and sales strategies

Clearly Define Business Goals

As you can see by looking at the different web presences for Kmart, they all support the overall organizational sales goals. I have no doubt that, internally, the corporation is measuring the ROI of each part of the overall web strategy. Otherwise, why invest?

Segment & Target

Kmart is making it easy for target audiences to interact and/or buy by understanding their preferences, where they hang out on the web and what messages buyers want to hear.

Audience-Driven Design

Kmartdesign.com is customized for the design audience, not only in it’s visual appearance but also in the content strategy of the web site. The site’s content strategy focuses in on sharing the unique personality of the brand’s designers, including many videos to reach the site’s young audience.

Mobile Design

Each website for Kmart is not only optimized for the web but also for mobile platforms. Considering the 65% annual predicted rise of mobile commerce by some analysts, this is likely to be a very smart move even if the analysts are overly optimistic.

Strategic Social Media

Kmart is using social media outlets like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to augment their existing, traditional marketing & PR strategies. The use of Social Media supports the goals of the web strategy by making it easier for buyers to shop while on Facebook. Enter ‘Shoppable Videos’.

Shoppable Video

What is it and why do we care? I haven’t personally seen ‘shoppable video’ previously but now I’m keeping an eye out for it. It’s an evolutionary idea for video. Users can watch a video about a particular design line and, by a single click on the video, browse the product line in Kmart’s online store. The video was created by AboutFace, a content marketing agency that makes short form video documentaries for brands, and then optimizes that content for use within social media.

While I think the web strategy will likely increase sales and have a positive impact on brand, it will likely have a larger impact on buyers that have little, if any, previous experience with the brand. The initiatives on the web from Kmart appear to be competitive reactions to Walmart’s in-store pickup service, released in 2007, and Target’s Style Boutique.

So what do you think? Will any of Kmart’s web strategy change the way you perceive the brand, making you more likely to shop with the company?

Once you click ‘Continue’ you’re presented with a slightly confusing screen to configure new privacy settings. Your old defaults are unselected by default.

Upon seeing the new screen, I found myself just accepting the new settings and then refining the privacy controls using the ‘Settings’ link. Several settings were set to ‘Friends of a Friend’ and ‘Everyone’ where I didn’t want this type of access. I found the most important settings under the ‘Profile’ and ‘Search’ link.

Rafe Needleman has written an easy to read article on refining Facebook privacy settings on his CNET blog.